Leicester novelist Drew Gummerson had a pretty humbling experience with his debut novel The Lodger, which went out of print after its publisher, The Gay Men's Press, was shut down in 2006. "Their parent company apparently discovered that the markup on dildos was enormous - they could buy them for 30p and sell them for £12 - whereas the markup on books was only about a pound. So they decided to concentrate on dildos. It's not for me to say which one gives more pleasure."
But instead of facing up to harsh economic reality and taking a night-school diploma in sex toy manufacture, Gummerson decided to keep writing, and soon found himself on Jonathan Cape's prestigious fiction list. Me and Mickie James, his first book for a major publisher, follows hunchbacked singer Mickie James and his anonymous male lover through London, Tokyo, Baghdad and Las Vegas as they chase electropop stardom with their band Down By Law. It's a disorienting journey, but Gummerson hits upon an awkward, ingenuous prose style that makes equal comedy out of the surreal and mundane.
Gummerson, who is 37 and works for the Leicestershire Constabulary's Crime Bureau, never planned to write a whole book about Down By Law. He's at his happiest writing short fiction, sometimes only 50 words long, like this morsel from his website: "We met on a blind date. She was supposed to have a rolled-up copy of The Times under her left arm. Instead, she had tightly packed the complete works of James Joyce into a small trolley-case. She pulled it romantically behind us as we walked along the moonlit path." But the novel came together by chance when he uploaded some longer stories, mostly about parts of the body, to ABCtales.com (a creative writing community through which he made friends with Swansea novelist Joe Dunthorne long before the publication in February of Dunthorne's acclaimed debut Submarine). One of these was "Teeth", about a man who has no teeth of his own so he steals some sharks' teeth from a museum, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August; and another was a story about a hunchback which, after some fierce encouragement from other writers on the site, would eventually grow into Me and Mickie James.
Although Mickie James hates his lump, Gummerson's novel has nothing to do with that the critic James Wood, discussing Tennessee Williams' story "The Arm", calls "the punitive tradition that has linked homosexuality with illness or deformity". Gummerson simply isn't interested in gay angst. "Mickie James hasn't got any hang-ups about being gay. When I was coming out, gay fiction was all about AIDS, and you'd read endless books about people dying. My fiction might be a reaction to that - when I write, I don't want to write something about death. I just want to write something exciting and happy."